The villains of Supernatural, Season 3, Episodes 12-14 include the old standbys demons and ghosts, as well as Thomas Edison’s spirit phone.

The crocotta, seen in this illustration from the Aberdeen Bestiary, lures its victims by sounding like someone they know in need of help

Rip out the crocotta’s crystal eyes, put them under your tongue — and you’ll be able to tell the future!

A demon found at Ostia, as depicted in Demonology and Devil-Lore

S3E12: “Jus in Bello”

Monster: Demon

Where it’s from: All over the world

Description: There’s something demonic in even the most appealing of gods, argues Moncure Daniel Conway, in his 1879 work Demonology and Devil-Lore. “Man found that in the earth good things came with difficulty, while thorns and weeds sprang up everywhere,” he writes. “The evil powers seemed to be the strongest. The best deity had a touch of the demon in him. The sun is the most beneficent, yet he bears the sunstroke along with the sunbeam, and withers the blooms he calls forth.” In fact, “deity and demon are from words once interchangeable,” Conway points out.

What it does: We’ve covered demons before, and their propensity for possessing people.

In this episode, demons are beelining for the Winchester boys, surrounding the sheriff’s office they’re in. “It’s like we got a contract on us,” Dean says, adding, “I think it’s ’cause we’re so awesome.”

How to defeat it: You can get matching pentagram sun tattoos, like Dean and Sam. They’re cheesy as hell, but hey: They keep you from being possessed.

A snouted demon, also from Demonology and Devil-Lore

You can also use a rosary to make holy water in the toilet. And, of course, there’s good old salt. Which leads to this funny exchange with the FBI agent:

Henriksen: Fighting off monsters with condiments. So, turns out demons are real.

The boys learn about a “big new up-and-comer” named Lilith. “And she really, really wants Sam’s intestines on a stick.” Grilled sausage, anyone?

Dean and Sam contemplate a spell that will vaporize all demons in a square radius — but it requires the sacrifice of a “person of virtue,” which is just another way of saying “virgin.” Not up to cutting Nice Nancy’s heart out of her chest, the Winchester Brothers decide to fight their way out, with the help of an exorcism over the PA system.

Demon Ruby gives them black mojo bags to throw Lilith off their trail. For now…

Some ghosts are trapped in continuous loops that play out their deaths

S3E13: “Ghostfacers”

Monster: Ghost

Where it’s from: Morton House, a haunted house possibly in Benton Harbor, Michigan

Description: This ghost looks remarkably lifelike.

What it does: The phantom returns every four years. Some call it the Leap Year Ghost. A crew of ghost hunters is filming an episode of their show Ghostfacers, and of course the Winchester boys show up masquerading as police to take on the evil spirit as well.

An apparition of a gangster gets gunned down. It’s a death echo, Dean explains. They seem to be an invention of the show, though there are plenty of reports of ghosts caught in neverending loops.

The Ghostfacers crew has some competition, including Josh Burger and Stan Maczek, shown using an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector

There are multiple death echoes, including a man hit by a train. These people didn’t die in Morton House, though. So why are their spirits trapped there?

Turns out the home’s last owner, Daggett, was a janitor at the hospital. He brought the bodies home “to play with them.”

Sam disappears. He and Corbett the intern are in some creepy kitchen while “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to” plays over and over. Poor Corbett, who was in love with Ed, one of the Ghostfacer crew, gets poked through the neck and dies.

Daggett is wearing a party hat. He gets lonely, you see. But Dean has no sympathy. “He’s never heard of a RealDoll?” he quips.

How to defeat it: “You gotta be gay for that poor dead intern,” the other Ghostfacer host tells Ed. He concedes and is able break Corbett out of the death echo and convince his spirit to take down Daggett. Remember, people, as Ed says, “Gay love can pierce through the veil of death and save the day.”

The crocotta looks like a big wolf-hyena hybrid, seen in the illuminated manuscript the Rochester Bestiary

S3E14: “Long-Distance Call”

Monster: Crocotta

Where it’s from: India and Ethiopia

Description: In folklore, the crocotta is a mishmash of animals, often described as a giant wolf-like hyena with cloven hooves. On the show, though, it’s a humanoid who lives in filth. In both versions, the monster has a unique means of luring its victims: It can mimic human speech and will call out someone’s name and other personal information, pretending to be someone in trouble. It then devours the poor suckers with the bone ridges it has instead of teeth.

Fun fact: Rip out its crystal eyes, put them under your tongue — and, by Merlin, you can tell the future!

What it does: A man gets a call on the phone from a woman named Linda. She wants him to join her. They love each other. He pulls the phone out of the wall, but it still rings. “Okay, Linda, you win,” he says. And blows his brains out.

The man’s wife confesses that she picked up the phone during one of these calls — and she only heard static.

The caller ID on the phone reads, SHA33. It’s actually a phone number that’s over a century old. Ten different homes all got calls from that number in the past two weeks, including Dean, who spoke with what sounded like his dead dad.

Which leads us to a red herring — but a fascinating one nonetheless. The Winchester boys are in Milan, Ohio, the birthplace of Thomas Edison. The inventor told The American Magazine in 1920 that he had been working on a spirit phone, “building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” He thought that a scientific device could detect the “life units” that get scattered throughout the universe when we die.

Thomas Edison tried to invent the spirit phone, which would let us speak with the dead

The killings all turn out to be the work of a crocotta: in this case, a man at the phone company. He’s a bit of a Luddite, offering up this meditation on the modern condition: “You’re all so connected. But you’ve never been so alone.” Preach!

How to defeat it: Ramming its head into a metal hook will do the trick. –Wally